


Contra Mundum

by PlaidAdder



Series: Missing Pages [15]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Epistolary, M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Story: The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-14 11:45:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14768993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: Dear Mycroft,Please do not begin mentally lecturing me about the danger of writing to you through the post. It became crystal clear earlier this morning that at least one of my enemies now knows exactly where I am. I therefore see no added danger in writing to you at your rooms, where I know your mail will not be handled by anyone else before it reaches you. Watson tells me you deduced my continued survival weeks ago. He has also suggested you might like to have written confirmation. I am in fact alive. There are also a few other points on which I should like to enlighten you.****Sherlock is getting very tired of being a fugitive, and would like a little help from his older brother.This story, "Tempus Fugit," "The Corwnall Job," and "What the Brandy's For" all narrate the same events, from different points of view. It doesn't really matter what order you read them in. All of them take place shortly after "A Close Shave."





	Contra Mundum

July ---, 1891.

 

The Villa

Tredannick Wollas

 

Dear Mycroft,

Please do not begin mentally lecturing me about the danger of writing to you through the post. It became crystal clear earlier this morning that at least one of my enemies now knows exactly where I am. I therefore see no added danger in writing to you at your rooms, where I know your mail will not be handled by anyone else before it reaches you. Watson tells me you deduced my continued survival weeks ago. He has also suggested you might like to have written confirmation. I am in fact alive. There are also a few other points on which I should like to enlighten you.

Point number one: Watson is here with me. When I return to my old life in Baker Street, he will return with me. I will hear no arguments to the contrary. 

Point number two: I cannot return to my old life in Baker Street until my many enemies no longer feel at liberty to make attempts upon my life at all hours of the day or night.

Point number three: I cannot address the problem outlined in point #2 from a villa in Cornwall.

In conclusion: I must have help in resolving this matter; and I fear it must come from you.

Without entering too much into details, let me lay the facts before you. This morning, as usual, Watson was up early. He decided to surprise me with breakfast. It would not, of course, have been a surprise; but in any case, as I lay awake listening to him starting up the ancient range down in the kitchen, I heard an unusual sputtering sound. In a moment, I detected a new smell of burning which was entirely distinct from the eleven classifiable odors ordinarily associated with the operation of that range. Then, there was a crash. I ran down to the kitchen to investigate, and found Watson lying on the floor near the range. He was deathly pale, twitching all over, muttering gibberish, and staring at the ceiling as if he could see depending from it every vile horror--real or imagined--that has ever tenanted the mind of man.

I note in passing, as I know you will find it interesting, that my early theories about the interrelations between emotional excitement and intellectual exertion were at that moment conclusively and forever falsified. I had scarcely drawn breath before a long and complex chain of wildly improbable and yet--as later events proved--entirely accurate deductions whirled its way through my brain. It is true that at that moment I could not have articulated each link in the chain verbally. Verbally, my mind apprehended only two simple words:  _Poison_ and  _out._ AccordinglyI dragged Watson from the kitchen, out through the front door, and deposited him on the lawn, to the leeward side of the kitchen. 

I would say something of my sensations, during the moments before I could see that the fresh sea air was purging the fumes from Watson's lungs and the terrors from his mind; but what could any of that mean to you? My emotions, to you, are just so many wild horses dragging me to my destruction. You don't want me to speak of my feelings to you; I would not profane them by doing so. I will confine myself, therefore, to stating that Watson did at last recover--and that I am not content to live in a world in which Watson might at any moment be done to death simply because he wanted to boil me an egg.

I asked for your help once before. You saved Victor Trevor's life, and you destroyed the first important friendship of my life. I wouldn't ask for your help now if I didn't know that neither you nor anything else on earth or in hell can destroy this one.

Please do something about this, Mycroft. I cannot bear for him to be hurt because of me. But he will not leave me; and neither would I let him go. We cannot live in this villa forever. Something has to change. I am a child playing with my ball of yarn. You are the one at the loom. Change the pattern, Mycroft. Weave your web. You owe it to me.

SHERLOCK.

P.S. See also [enclosed letter from Watson](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14781737).

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The whole point of getting them to Cornwall was, originally, to do something based on "Devil's Foot." The canon story is a pretty dramatic moment in the H/W relationship, and the Granada adaptation of it (less the hallucination sequence) makes it even deeper. But I found when they actually arrived there that I'd already done all the relationship development that happens, in canon, in stories like "Devil" and "Garridebs." Holmes and Watson have by now both faced all their fears and overcome them; and Holmes is certainly not, at this point in the story, going to recklessly and gratuitously endanger both of them. So instead, this part of the narrative is about Holmes and Watson planning to bring themselves and their new relationship back to London.
> 
> As Holmes hints in this letter, his feelings during this incident were terrifying, but not so overwhelming that he couldn't still do his job and save Watson. This is an important realization for him. He feels, of course, much more than he is willing to tell Mycroft; but I figure most readers can pretty much fill those feelings in for themselves at this point.


End file.
